In a recent interview with the Austrian newssite derStandard.at, GNOME designer Jon McCann talks about GNOME OS, the consequences of Canonical leaving GNOME behind, the purported removal of features and the future role of Linux distributions. "I think there was a time when GNOME had kind of a crisis, we didn't know where we wanted to go, we were lacking goals and vision - that was the end of the GNOME2 cycle. So we pulled together and formed a vision where we want to go - and actually did something about it. And now we have been marching on that plan for quite some time."

"The Linux desktop"? You mean like GNOME is there to differentiate themselves from "the Linux desktop" (may it be XFCE, KDE or $your_favorite_linux_desktop.

I have news for you: Unity is a linux desktop and I found it to be closer to traditional desktop concepts then GNOME Shell.

No, I don't mean "like GNOME". I mean like every other Xorg based desktop environment that's made available in a form friendly for packaging on many distributions.

It came when development on GNOME 3 started. There where critics from the beginning the direction GNOME 3 was going to. Ubuntu's try to sort that out failed, Unity was born. FLOSS on work.

They contributed a GNOME 2 centric distribution focused on the desktop (unlike RH), became popular and increased the GNOME 2 user-base significantly. New developers joined, documentation was written, translation and bugreports came in and so on.

Now only Red Hat is left and they have no focus on the desktop. You can turn around like crazy but it does not change the fact that GNOME lost one (or two if you add Mint, threr if you add debian, ...) of its most valuable distributions.

I was talking about contribution of code and development work. Ubuntu was certainly important as a software distribution of Gnome, thanks in large part to key Gnome developers choosing to work on it and then quitting over the years when the orders from Canonical were to move to a different direction.

MATE is a Fedora 18 FEATURE and is as auch in the same role, position the GNOME Shell is. No difference.

There's just one difference... I'll let you figure that one out when you download Fedora-18-Desktop.iso a few months down the line.